Biography

Pablo Vázquez-Gestal received his Ph.D. from the Universidad Complutense (Madrid, Spain) in June 2008 with a dissertation on the political culture promoted by Charles Bourbon as King of the Two Sicilies in Naples (1734-1759). Previously, he examined the undefined tendencies of European court studies in the last twenty-five years in a book entitled El espacio del poder. La corte en la historiografía modernista española y europea (Valladolid, 2005).
While working on his dissertation, Vázquez-Gestal was Visiting Researcher at the Università Cattolica (Milan, Italy) and Georgetown University (Washington DC, USA), as well as a Research Fellow at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici (Naples, Italy). He was also a Teaching Assistant at the Universidad Complutense from 2003 to 2005, teaching lower and upper division level courses on eighteenth-century Spanish history and on contemporary historiographical trends. In addition, he has been the Research Director of two significant historical exhibitions and has lectured in Spain, the USA, England and Italy in the last three years.
Vázquez-Gestal’s current research interests focus on the court traditions, visual cultures and representational strategies of the European monarchies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently working on a book-length project entitled King’s Identities. Enacting the Monarchy in Eighteenth-Century Naples (1734-1759) which analyzes how the new sovereign of the Two Sicilies organized his image and ceremonies in order to display the diverse facets of his royal identity.  which analyzes how the new sovereign of the Two Sicilies organized his image and ceremonies in order to display the diverse facets of his royal identity.